Scott C. Embler’s production of “7th Monarch,” playing at the Acorn Theater, is directed with skill and capably acted by a smart if not always ideally cast ensemble. But while the story is absorbing, this odd mystery by Jim Henry has a whiff of stale psychodrama that overloads on sorrowful revelations with inadequate foreshadowing.

The rumpled presence of Michael Cullen in the cast as a melancholy cop is just one reminder of the Atlantic Theater Company’s terrific 2005 production of Rolin Jones’s “Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow,” a superior play also about an academically brilliant, socially challenged young woman with parent issues. But the playful, poetic imagination that distinguished that work is missing in this tonally uncertain drama about loss and damage.

Instead the director places “7th Monarch” awkwardly between stylized and naturalistic presentations, on a fussy set by Shoko Kambara that is a poor fit for much of the action.

Miriam (Gretchen Hall) is a math prodigy who dropped out of college while on a fast track to work for NASA. Stuck in high-strung adolescence, she is often seen wearing an astronaut’s helmet while whizzing around her small Indiana hometown on her pink dragster bike. When a Social Security investigator, Raina (Leslie Hendrix), makes inquiries because Miriam has continued to cash checks made out to her absent parents, their unexplained disappearance raises the possibility of crimes worse than forgery.

An avid newspaper reader gifted with a photographic memory, Miriam has insights into the histories of the district prosecutor (Michael Rupert), the inexperienced public defender assigned to her case (Matthew Humphreys) and the bereaved detective (Mr. Cullen) overseeing her detainment. But Raina remains an enigma until Miriam connects the dots in the investigator’s tragic past, finding common ground.

Mr. Humphreys and Ms. Hendrix are somewhat mismatched in age for the hesitant attraction between their characters to ring true, and sketching credible relationships is not Mr. Henry’s forte. But while Ms. Hall’s excitability and surfeit of whimsical quirks often grate, the entire ensemble has affecting moments.

A version of this review appears in print on June 26, 2012, on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: Math Prodigy, Too Smart by Half, Stuck in High-Strung Adolescence. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

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